Lynchian
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Of or pertaining to David Keith Lynch (1946–2025), American filmmaker and director whose surrealist films are characterized by dreamlike imagery, sound design, and narrative, juxtapositions of the mundane and the grotesque, and an air of mystery or unease.
"An academic definition of Lynchian might be that “the term refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter.” […] Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. […] I've noted since 1986 (when Blue Velvet was released) that a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures-grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances."
Example
More examples"An academic definition of Lynchian might be that “the term refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter.” […] Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. […] I've noted since 1986 (when Blue Velvet was released) that a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures-grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances."
Etymology
From Lynch + -ian.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.